I Am Rahab…The ‘Insider’

by MaryO

I guess it depends on perspective. Am I looking inside out or outside in?

I was born into an already abusive environment; I was born ‘into’; it was not my DNA, just where I landed. It took me nearly 50 years to get to that truth! My earliest memories were consumed by fear and more fear. I recall watching TV shows like Happy Days and The Brady Bunch sitting on our living room floor and getting lost in their worlds. I believe those times were the onset of BPD Borderline Personality Disorder. I wasn’t just daydreaming; I was desperate for an escape to be anything other than what I was and where I was. That behavior progressed from TV shows to people in my life and even strangers; anywhere else was better.

I don’t know how I did it thinking back. I guess I learned quickly. I have a specific memory of Kindergarten, P.S. 122 in the Bronx; my teacher was Ms. Florence; she was tall, dark brown straight long hair, soft brown eyes, and the prettiest smile. She often handed out Pretzel Rods as a treat; I can still smell them. She was so kind. She intentionally looked me right in the eyes, and something I rarely did, I looked right back at her too. I would get lost in her soft eyes; I saw something I had never seen in another person. She searched me, and I didn’t feel intimidated or scared. She was communicating something to me in those moments. There was a gentleness, a peace, and I wanted more of it. I never realized how that experience kept me. Someone’s kindness kept me going. I guess I figured there has to be more of that somewhere. My childhood after that was robotic; it was clear everything had to remain silent in me. No other kids my age, cousins, or other family members seemed to show any signs they were going through anything like my family. I didn’t know what was left or right. I had one measure, and it was what was happening in my house. I wasn’t one of the ‘lucky ones.’ I guess I kept it ‘good’ for the most part. In our apartment building, the neighbors heard it all, and they saw the police come to our apartment regularly. I looked for signs and didn’t notice any of this going on anywhere else. No one seemed concerned. At school, the comments on my report card were the same, I was timid and quiet. I wasn’t the one to put it all into my school work either; I couldn’t focus, not knowing when the ground would be taken from under me. My thoughts were with the weekend or night before and whether it could get any worse, and I couldn’t contain that I knew the answer. My father drank, and in his rage, I felt empty, recalling that I could do nothing to stop him from beating my sister— the thoughtless, brutal beatings. The verbal abuse was to deliberately eradicate any sign of life in her. Then the evenings, when he sat in the chair by a wall of my mother’s plants as my siblings and I watched television. He would call us to him individually; he touched and violated our innocence, bodies, hearts, and spirits. At night he came into our shared bedroom. The extreme anger towards my sister just several years older than me was now a different emotion as he sexually abused her.

What do you do with this as a child? 

I tried to be normal. Yes, of course, there was a spillage of outward behavior. I felt like a freak as I got older, and I wanted help. My mother’s remedy of ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with her or why she acts that way or does those things’ set me up. I embraced that I was different, a default. My life functionally spiraled into all kinds of dysfunction throughout my adolescence and adulthood. But the most debilitating was the complete loss of self— self rejecting, devaluing, and abandoning myself.

  Ms. Florence had to be God Himself. Hope looked me in the eye back then and kept a place in me for what was to come, took me thru it, and then back to start over on a new journey of my own life— back to know who I am before anything else had consumed me. I was created and re-created by the hands of God. I am LOVE, RESPECT, VALUED, USEFUL, and ENOUGH…because I am Rahab too.